1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to communication between applications in different execution environments and, more particularly, to application service exchange across different execution environments.
2. History of Related Art
In many embedded systems, all applications execute in the same native execution environment. The execution environment defines the possibilities and constraints for applications in terms of how services are accessed and used, how events are received, how shared resources such as memory are used, how operating systems work and are used, how parallelity in execution in the system is achieved, and how the application is controlled in terms of start and stop. In other words, the execution environment defines the possibilities and constraints for execution and installation of the application. Use of the same execution environment for all applications implies that the rules for all applications are the same throughout the system and that execution-environment specifications are controlled from a single organization.
However, in mobile devices, additional execution environments (e.g., the non-native execution environment JAVA) are being introduced that exist in parallel with the mobile device's native execution environment. In addition, many mobile-device platform customers have proprietary execution environments that are ported onto a mobile-device platform in order to preserve the customers' investments in legacy applications.
Standardized execution environments, such as JAVA, may impose requirements on other execution environments that coexist with standardized execution environments via, for example, the JAVA Specification Request (JSR) specifications. For instance, JSR 75 states that when an end user of a JAVA application edits a phone number, an existing phonebook on the system is to be invoked in order to be able to select the desired contact and then copy the phone number back to an edit field in the JAVA application. Thus, the JAVA execution environment puts requirements on an arbitrary application, which might execute in the native execution environment or in another commercial/proprietary execution environment. Since the specific design of such applications are not under the control of, for example, platform manufacturers, these requirements call for techniques that allow applications in different execution environments to exchange services across execution-environment boundaries.